OpenGL Headline News

The Khronos Group today announced a call for participation in a new initiative to define a cross-vendor, royalty-free, open standard for access to modern virtual reality (VR) devices.

The rapid growth of the virtual reality market has led to platform fragmentation, forcing VR applications and engines to be ported and customized to run on multiple VR runtimes, and requiring VR sensors and displays to be integrated with multiple driver interfaces. This fragmentation slows the widespread availability of compelling VR experiences, creating added expense for developers wishing to support multiple VR devices, and hindering the adoption of innovative user interface technologies.

Any company interested to participate is strongly encouraged to join Khronos for a voice and a vote in the development process. Design contributions from any member are welcome. Some of the Khronos member companies helping to get this initiative underway include AMD, ARM, Epic Games, Google, Intel, LunarG, NVIDIA, Oculus, Razer, Tobii, Valve and VeriSilicon. More information on this initiative and and how to join the Khronos Group is available at:

Amazon EC2 users will soon have the ability to add OpenGL acceleration to existing EC2 instance types. Amazon-optimized OpenGL library will automatically detect and make use of Elastic GPUs. Amazon will start out with Windows support for OpenGL, and plan to add support for the Amazon Linux AMI and other versions of OpenGL after that. The GPU added to the instance can have 1, 2, 4, or 8 gigabytes of video memory. It’s becoming much easier to use OpenGL from GPUs in the cloud.

CG Internals released globjects, a cross-platform, open source C++ library to ease the use of modern OpenGL. It facilitates a less cluttered and less error-prone use of the OpenGL API: e.g., it reduces the amount of OpenGL code required for rendering and facilitates coherent OpenGL use by means of a type-safe abstraction layer based on glbinding and GLM. Common rendering processes are automated and missing features of specific OpenGL drivers are partially simulated or emulated at run-time.

Lighthouse3D added a new repository on github for Android demos for OpenGL with Java and C++ (NDK). The first demo is OpenGLJava, an app including model loading in json format and rendering with textures.